Articles, such as absorbent articles, are sometimes produced on a continuous manufacturing line. Initially, a continuous base web may be conveyed down the manufacturing line and various components may be added to it. At the point in the manufacturing line where the articles are in final form, or a semi-finished form, it may be desirable to separate discrete articles from the continuous webs so that they can be processed for packaging or further manufacturing, for example. Typically, an anvil roll is paired with a cutting roll having a knife to cut the continuous webs. When articles, such as pants, especially larger pants (e.g., adult incontinence pants), are run through a nip between the anvil roll and the cutting roll, the articles may have a tendency to fold over themselves in various portions. This may be caused by contraction of elastics or snap-back (post-cutting) of elastics in elasticized belts of these pant articles. In other instances, this may be caused by merely the large size of the articles (e.g., bigger crotch regions outside of the cutting area). Elasticized belts and/or larger sized articles may be difficult to control with vacuum alone. Furthermore, in the conventional anvil roll/cutting roll set-up, the cutting roll and/or anvil roll is usually changed out each time a different size (or pitch) of article is desired to be cut. For example, when running a first article with a pitch (i.e., machine direction length) of 200 mm, the cutting roll and/or the anvil are usually changed out to run a second article with a pitch of 300 mm. This can lead to costly downtime. Furthermore, conventional anvil roll/cutting rolls assemblies have a problem with roll parallelism and center-to-center distances which may cause issues with cuts or separation of the continuous webs.
In view of the foregoing, methods and apparatuses for separating discrete articles from a web of the articles should be improved.